


Two Thousand Light Years From Home

by neverfaraway



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Episode Related, Episode: s05e04 The End, M/M, Missing Scene, Season/Series 05
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-02
Updated: 2020-08-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:02:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25674004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neverfaraway/pseuds/neverfaraway
Summary: He waits for a smart comment, a quip that amounts to sexual harassment, but Cas ignores him, frowning at nothing and dragging a shirt over his head, the lean, hardship-wrought lines of his stomach disappearing beneath cotton so worn Dean thinks distantly that it would feel soft and thin beneath his fingertips.Missing scenes from 5x04 'The End' - Future!Cas sets every one of Dean’s nerves on edge, but he keeps finding excuses to bring him closer.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 7
Kudos: 87





	Two Thousand Light Years From Home

**Author's Note:**

> My other recent SPN fic is being updated with a new chapter more or less weekly - check it out here: [Five Proverbs to Live By](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1859959)
> 
> Has anybody else embarked on a Supernatural re-watch to try and prepare themselves for the rest of Season 15? I recently re-watched 'The End' and had... feelings about the hot mess that is Future!Cas. I refuse to believe that Season 5 Dean, who’s only just coming to terms with the fact that he’s hot for whatever’s going on under Cas’ trench coat, wouldn’t be having some feelings, too. 
> 
> Late-60s Rolling Stones references abound; kudos to you if you spot them.

“What happened to you?”

Cas is smiling. He’s loose and sloppy and he giggles - honest to God _giggles_ , and no one hates that word, especially when applied to Cas, more than Dean - when Dean makes a shitty joke about strapping on his wings. 

“Life,” he says, hazily.

Dean hates it. He hates it like a solid fist in the gut, and he can’t help repeating it incredulously. “ _Life?_ ”

“For what it’s worth,” Cas adds, shrugging, and Dean honestly doesn’t know if he’s making a play on the hippie thing, so he lets it slide, choosing to focus instead on the way Cas is soft and worn-down around the edges, like he’s been defeated too often to hold himself together.

“You’re, what... David Koresh with wings, now? You’re hosting orgies, for cryin’ out loud.”

Cas eyes him slowly, and Dean feels himself heat up from his boots to his roots as he’s silently appraised. “Why, are you offering to get involved?”

“Stop,” Dean snaps. So far, he’s held it together, but that sleazy, baked grin on Cas’ face might just be the thing that tips him over the edge. Whammied five years into the future by an angel with anger management issues - why not? Just the latest bucket of crap emptied in the path of Dean’s already shitty life. But Dean has limits, and it turns out that Cas looking him up and down like he’s a bacon double cheeseburger with a side of fries runs straight into every single one of them. “Stop with the - the Maharishi crap, alright?”

Cas laughs. “Does it make you uncomfortable, Dean?”

“Hell yes, it makes me uncomfortable. I’m serious, what the hell happened to you, man?”

Cas rubs his eyes and smiles at the ceiling. It makes Dean want to wipe the smirk off his face with a kiss from each of his fists. “It’s a long story. Very long. Too long for you, I’d bet; how long do you have?”

“Three days.”

Cas whistles low and sardonic. “Well, if you make it that far, you might want to reconsider the orgy.”

Dean rolls his eyes. “Whatever, man. I got bigger shit to deal with than you going full Love Guru.”

He’s halfway out the door when Cas catches up with him. There’s a hand on his sleeve and Cas curls chilled fingers around his wrist. “Dean, wait. You’re younger than him,” Cas says, staring up at him, frowning as though he’s trying to divine something about the state of Dean’s soul. “You’re... carrying less weight.”

“No shit, 2009’s Sesame Street compared to this.”

“For now, anyway.”

Cas is close enough that Dean can smell the lingering, acrid scent of pot rising from his stupid hippie shirt. The uncanny valley dissonance between this and Cas’ usual, oblivious brand of disregard for his personal space makes Dean’s skin crawl. “Dude, can you not...?”

Cas tucks back into himself, lifts his hands like he’s sorry for touching, even though he’d kept them to himself. “Sorry. I - sorry. It’s been a while.”

Dean swallows. It’s not like it’s a revelation; he knows damn well what that pull in his gut means when Cas descends with a flapping of wings and stands too close and stares at him like he’s the only important thing in the room. It’s just that the reality - having the evidence of what it’s done to Cas swaying in front of him, crumpled and damaged and strung out - is different from his idle fantasies about closing the distance between them and seeing whether that intent look in Cas’ eye means what he’s been starting to think it might.

  


* * *

  
The news that his future self is a dick is hardly a surprise, but it makes Dean sick to watch him prove it so definitively. He stands by while he watches himself raise his gun and shoot a guy in the head in cold blood, then listens in disbelief to his own insane plan to ship out and try to shoot the devil. By the time Cas springs the revelation that he’s back in the torture business, he’s nauseated and heavy with self-disgust. If Sam were here, he’d dig him in the ribs with an elbow and make a quip about this truly being the darkest timeline; instead, he watches himself outline the suicide mission to the rest of the group and wonders why Cas bothered fighting his way into Hell for him, if this where it gets them, in the end.

“What?” Cas says, tilting his chin at Dean’s future self like he wants nothing more than for him to haul off and punch him in the mouth. “I like past you.”

He’s smiling, smiling, eyes crinkled at the corners, and Dean watches the shapes that Castiel is pulling and suffers a shudder of sickly recognition. Dean knows exactly what Cas is doing, with his hard grin and these attempts to play them off against one another. It’s bitter and badly disguised: Cas is pretending it doesn’t hurt to look at the man across the table from him, that he doesn’t give a fuck whose cabin Dean spends the night in, and fuck, if that doesn’t feel like a slug in the guts.

Later, after the news about Sam, when his head’s spinning and he needs a little bit of something familiar to set him back on his feet, he goes looking for someone to talk to. Chuck’s out: he’s fucked beyond the ability to babble tightly about stock-taking and the inevitability that they’ll all die of malnutrition long before the croats get through the camp’s defences. Grimacing and making a swift escape, Dean heads in the only other direction he can think to go, pushing aside that stupid beaded curtain to find Cas uncharacteristically grim-faced and in the middle of changing out of his clothes. He waits for a smart comment, a quip that amounts to sexual harassment, but Cas ignores him, frowning at nothing and dragging a shirt over his head, the lean, hardship-wrought lines of his stomach disappearing beneath cotton so worn Dean thinks distantly that it would feel soft and thin beneath his fingertips.

Cas grabs a bottle from the collection housed on top of the cabinet by the bed and twists off the cap. Its contents are green and look like they have a kick like a mule, and Dean winces, watching him knock back a generous fifth without taking a breath. When he’s done, Cas grimaces, waving the bottle in Dean’s direction without looking at him.

“I’m good,” Dean says with feeling, so Cas shrugs and recaps the bottle before tossing it onto the bed.

It seems that Cas is planning to ignore Dean to the best of his abilities. He makes as though to leave, grabbing a jacket from a peg on the wall, and shoulder checks Dean by accident as he passes him in the doorway.

“Dude,” Dean says, catching his arm. For all that Cas must be high as balls and just knocked back a fifth of liquor, he’s steady in Dean’s grip, sighing deeply and blinking up at him, vaguely annoyed.

“What’s the problem?”

“Look, I get the whole go-out-swinging routine, believe me, I do... but you know you’re walking into a shit show, right? The kind people don’t come back from?”

Cas rolls his eyes, and it makes Dean so angry he might be about to throw up. “Nothing gets past you, Dean.”

“For fuck’s sake, Cas. You don’t have to do this just because he says that’s how it is.”

Cas pretends to consider it for a second. “That _would_ be a gross violation of the democratic ideals on which this commune was founded.” His breath smells of aniseed and this close his eyes are pink-rimmed and hazy, dancing distractedly over the planes of Dean’s face.

“C’mon, man. That dickwad says jump and y’all chorus ‘how freakin’ high?’”

“Dean.”

“You don’t have to do this for him,” Dean says, low and urgent.

Cas looks at him, finally. It’s the first time he’s been recognisable beneath the booze and the attitude, and he suddenly looks older than Dean is used to. “What else is there to do?”

Dean honestly has no clue. He knows this isn’t what Zachariah put him here to do, but the other asshole wearing his face has the right amount of crazy in him to send all these people to their deaths, and he can’t let Cas do this, can’t let him throw his life away because he made the shitty decision to hitch his cart to Dean’s wagon once upon a time. He can’t fathom why Cas would have wanted to in the first place, and he sure as shit isn’t going to let it be the reason Cas goes out bloody, ripped apart by croats or burned out by Lucifer.

“Dean,” Cas says, leaning into him. He smells of sandalwood and licorice and his beard is rough against Dean’s jaw. He lingers, licks at the seam of Dean’s lips, and Dean lets him in, lets the heat pool between them. Cas sighs when he retreats. “It’s been a while since he let me do that,” he says ruefully.

“Yeah?” Dean’s voice sounds low and jagged, and he sways out of Cas’ reach only to let Cas get a hand on him anyway, his long fingers splayed on Dean’s cheek.

Suddenly, Cas looks tired, in a way Dean can't remember seeing in the lines around his eyes before. “This you was... well, you’re what I decided to stay for, so I suppose you had to be something spectacular.”

“Cas,” Dean says quietly, because Cas’ hand is still on his face, and he’s breathing boozy breath into the close air between them. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Cas shrugs. “Every night I still ask the Lord, ‘Why?’ and haven’t heard a decent answer yet.”

Dean frowns, trying to place the quote. “Are you quoting freakin' Kerouac at me?”

Cas smirks as though Dean’s passed a test, nothing like the vaguely insulting look Sam throws his way whenever he reveals that he has, in fact, at some point in his life, read a book.

Dean’s about to attempt to say something comforting, like there’s anything he can do to fix the slump of Cas’ shoulders in his unlikely army fatigues, but the other Dean is barking orders in the distance, answered by a ragged chorus of voices, and the moment passes.

“What the fuck happened to free will?” Dean demands, because he’s suddenly furious, with himself, with Zachariah, with this whole bullshit Back to the Future set-up. Cas has one hand curled around his hip and it feels _good_ , even if it shouldn't. “You break away from one bunch of assholes just to tie yourself down to that - that _psycho_? Why the fuck would you do that, Cas?”

“I made my choice,” Cas says, simply, smiling sincerely for the first time since Dean laid eyes on him. It’s incongruous beneath the beard, but at least his eyes are the same. Dean kisses him because his eyes are blue and sad and exactly the goddamn same.

Cas hums out a breath, opens up beneath him. It’s a slow, filthy slide, Cas’ tongue behind Dean’s teeth, his hand spasming on Dean’s hip like he’s resisting the urge to grab a handful of his ass. Cas tugs him forward with fingers wound in the loops of his belt and Dean lets him, nudging him up against the wall outside the curtain. He can’t imagine kissing his Cas this way, dirty and familiar, not with him still reeling from the consequences of his rebellion. Knowing that this is here, between them, that all Dean has to do is wait for him, makes something hopeful and bleak blossom in his chest. Right in front of him is ample evidence of what loving him has done to Cas, and that hurts like a motherfucker.

“Dean,” Cas says, in that low-down, gravel voice he uses when Dean has done something to displease him, and boy, is Dean going to have trouble hearing that again without pitching a tent in his jeans.

Cas wants him: his mouth’s a mess and his eyes are dark and catching on Dean’s tongue when he licks the corner of his lips. He’d let Dean have this, if he asked, and then Dean would have the answer to the question his lizard brain has been asking in his dreams lately, about how Cas would sound if Dean ever got the chance to strip him out of that goddamn coat and tie.

“Think you can be quick?” Cas asks, eyebrow raised. He’s beautiful, the hottest thing Dean’s had in front of him for months, but it’s not what Dean wants at all. This Cas, with his bruised eyes and lazy smiles, isn’t what Dean wants to see when he opens his eyes.

“I can’t do this,” he says against Cas’s mouth when he arches up to kiss him again. “I’m sorry, Cas, I can’t.”

Cas’ head hits the wood cladding with a thump and he laughs, a smoker’s laugh, his fingers flexing on Dean’s hips. Dean’s about to react, about to say _what the hell, man_ and push him away, because this, this bitterness, only confirms that this version of Cas isn’t the one he wants. He doesn’t appreciate having it rubbed in his face, all the ways this Cas isn’t the angel he left behind in 2009, because it makes his erstwhile daydreams about peeling him out of the trench coat and laying him out in Baby’s back seat seedy and humiliating. He’s been jerking off over a guy who probably doesn’t even experience the requisite urges, and suddenly that feels like a desecration.

“If you’re finished, we’re loading up,” says his own voice, low and hard, somewhere over his left shoulder.

Dean snatches his hands away as though he’s been burned, reclaiming his thumb from where it’s been pressing into the soft skin just above the waistband of Cas’ jeans. It’s too late; his counterpart is standing at the corner of the next cabin, lantern light painting his face into sharp relief. His hands are at his sides, but Dean sees that one of them is clenched into a fist, and his eyes only leave Dean’s the once, to flicker over Cas with an expression that’s something akin to disgust. Dean’s thigh is still between Cas’ knees and Cas is languid and useless against the doorframe, laughing at the sky. Future Dean looks seconds away from laying down a beating; if he had a gun in his hands right now, Dean would be ducking and covering to avoid becoming a smear on the wood-clad wall. Just as Dean’s about to extricate himself from Cas’ grasp and think about squaring up, his other self casts a final, incendiary glance at Cas and disappears in the direction of the trucks, yelling at the others to get the weapons loaded up.

“Shut the fuck up, man,” Dean says to Cas, extracting his leg from between Cas’ thighs. “Did you fucking plan this?”

Cas shrugs, still smiling at the sky even as he adjust himself in jeans that are hanging off his hips. “We’re going off to war. Sure you want to die a virgin?”

Dean pushes him away. “Fuck you, man.”

He makes to follow the other Dean, but Cas laughs again and calls his name. “I wasn’t using you, Dean. Me and him - it’s complicated.”

“Complicated is banging your girl’s best friend and calling them both by the wrong name,” Dean mutters, running a hand over his eyes, “not whatever the fuck this is.”

Cas is sad around the eyes again, but he smiles anyway. It seems to be the only thing he’s done since he worked out which version of Dean was standing in front of him in the cabin.

“Wanna ride with me?” he asks. “Look at it this way, at least you’ve given me something good to remember when the croats turn my insides into my outsides.”

Dean hates him, hates everything about this fucked up vision of - what? The future? Does he actually believe Zachariah when he says this is what they’ll all become? Most of all he hates the way Cas holds his own life so cheaply, and that it’s all because of him.

“Better get going,” Cas says. The smile’s still right there, still uncanny enough that looking at him is starting to give Dean a headache. “Don’t want our fearless leader to get his panties in a twist.”

It hits Dean in the guts, then, that Cas can’t even bring himself say his name, this future version of himself who’s planning to walk his only remaining friends into an ambush. It’s the damage that this life - that _Dean_ \- has done to him that makes it so hard to look at him head-on.

“You’ve got a chance to do better,” Cas says, as they head to meet the others at the trucks.

He means it kindly, but Dean has seen before what losing Sam has done to him, and trusting himself to make a better choice would require giving himself more credit than he’s ever done previously.

The worst thing is that he’s worked out what all the smiling’s about. Cas, after everything, stoned and drunk, a butterfly broken on a wheel, has been looking at him as though he still has faith.


End file.
